Audit: Taxpayer art funds go to big cities, rich groups

ATLANTA - Tax money intended to make the arts available to all Georgians too often winds up going to well-endowed organizations in the big cities, according to a recent state audit.

But Susan Weiner, a former Savannah mayor who heads the Georgia Council for the Arts, says the money can only go where the organizations happen to be.

Evaluators with the state Department of Audits and Accounts found Weiner had made many improvements in the tiny state agency since Gov. Sonny Perdue appointed her in January 2004. But they also were critical of the concentration of funding in metropolitan areas, where 90 percent of the money the council distributed wound up in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2005.

People living in the metro areas received an average of 43 cents each in council funding, while those outside the largest counties only got 28 cents apiece, according to the report.

At the same time, the council awarded more than one-third of its funds to large organizations that had operating budgets of more than $1 million, and half of them have surpluses or endowments nearly as big as the council's annual budget. Grants to those groups have less of an impact, the auditors said, than the same amounts given to more modest organizations.

Even funds from a program the Georgia General Assembly established specifically to benefit residents of rural areas still didn't entirely make it out of cities. Just 26 percent of the Grassroots Arts Program went to rural counties.

"Our review found that the council needs to take additional action to more fully address its legislative mandate to improve public access to the arts," the authors of the report wrote.

Weiner, though, says she has sought to reach out to smaller communities, even calling local civic organizations in towns across the state searching for arts groups that could receive funding. The problem is that most small towns don't have enough people to buy art or theater tickets nor the donors to support formal arts organizations, she said.

State law prohibits the council from making grants to individuals or groups that are not incorporated with the state and have a tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service. Such organizations are more likely to exist in a city with foundations and businesses and large audiences that will support them, Weiner said.

One way to expose rural residents to the arts is to fund outfits that tour across the state or draw an audience from a wide region.

The Lyndon House Arts Center operated by the city of Athens is one such place.

Curator Nancy Lukasiewicz said, "We provide service to people other than just inside our county. ... I don't think there is any process to gauge the impact of that."

In another effort to expose more rural people to the arts, Weiner has overseen the creation of a digital gallery to display the state's own collection of 353 works of art. It will be online starting this fall, so it will be accessible to residents anywhere in Georgia.

Members of the arts community say her experience in Savannah and her current home in the North Georgia mountains helps her understand there is indeed art being created outside of Atlanta, an orientation not common among other funding sources, they say.

Outreach, though, has had to be done on top of a major reshaping at the council.

In 2004, Weiner, who has been both a professional actress and a management consultant, found an agency that was in disarray.

It had had no executive director for a year when she came on board. She automated many procedures, allowing her to cut back on staff when the budget got tight without having to reduce the amount the council awards in grants, $3.65 million in fiscal year 2005.

As a former politician, she's been aggressive about lobbying for the funds the council has gotten.

The auditors credited her with many improvements in the running of the small agency.

The auditors say, however, the agency staff should be even more discriminating. Money shouldn't go to help organizations simply do what they were already going to do or to pay their light bill, according to the report.

Instead, any organization getting a grant should be able to show what it is doing extra with the added money.